This invention relates to a panty brief consisting wholly or partly of elastic material, preferably made by knitting or crocheting, formed as a flat, substantially rectangular bag, which is closed along three marginal zones and is open in the whole extension of one longitudinal edge to form a waist opening, the bag being provided with two leg openings.
It is known to produce panty briefs, e.g. by knitting, with varying tightness of the stitches in larger or smaller areas, and wtih knitted-in elastic yarn materials. It is also known to produce panty briefs with waist and leg openings in one and the same operation. Furthermore it is known to produce such panty briefs as tubular units in endless lengths, which are subsequently severed to obtain the final product in the form of a panty brief which does not require any finishing steps in the form of cutting, edging, seaming, etc.
These panty briefs are very cheap to manufacture as compared to the conventional factory-tailored panty briefs which are cut, edged and seamed, but they have several drawbacks.
One substantial drawback of these products is that the leg openings are not made in a bias-cut fashion corresponding to that of factory-tailored products. These products are made in the form of a front and a back piece which are inter-knitted along the sides and in the crotch region of the panty brief. Owing to this procedure, the crotch region will take an inconvenient fashion with a transversely extending seam or selvage. As a consequence of the straight leg opening, the outer portions of the panty brief will extend a considerable distance down along the outer side of the thighs of the wearer and will so to speak form short legs of the panty brief. These panty legs tend to restrain the freedom of movement of the hip joints, because they do not follow the natural shape of the legs. It has been attempted to remedy this drawback by cutting and edge-seaming of the leg openings after the panty briefs have been severed from the endless length. Hereby the bias-cut fashion is obtained, but the additional operations referred to result in a substantial increase of the production costs.